Preternatural Too: Gyre

With one hand she unclasped and passed across to Rohmer the filigreed round the size of the palm of her hand which had been holding a paisley scarf at her throat. "We just call them scarf pins instead of cloak pins. And as we get older and our necks get crepier, we start collecting more and more of them. Nothing like a well-draped scarf to take a few years off you. Next to the right hair color, of course."

Rohmer touched her own throat absently, telling herself it was to keep from watching Jenner take both hands off the wheel at 60 mph to refasten the scarf pin, all but holding the car in the lane with her knees like a dressage rider. Rohmer thought about coloring her hair at least once a week, but didn't, telling herself it was because she liked the asymmetrical way the gray was growing in - roanish, almost iridescent, like an S.oteri.

"Of course, you adamantly refuse to look your age, even without any help," Jenner scolded affectionately. "How old are your kids now? Have you thrown them out of the nest yet?"

"Nicole's twenty-four and engaged. I told you that. And Matt graduates next June. I'm not pushing them out. They'll leave when they're ready."

She smiled; she loved her kids, and loved the fact that people always told her she didn't look her age, even though it hadn't been all that important until she'd met Raymond, who was so much younger. Raymond...was there anything that didn't remind her of him, even after all this time?

Four years since he'd stalked out of her life, his back arched like a toreador's, a measure of his fury, though he'd softened later. One year, seven months and an odd number of days since he'd even condescended to call her and, no, she would not call him. Why, then, was no day complete without her thinking about him?

Think about something else! Kettles and pitchforks and thumbscrews - oh, my!

"Okay, premise:" she said. "A thousand years from now some everyday things will be so drastically different or even newly-created - devices for functions we don't even have today, technologies we can't even imagine because we don't yet have a use for them - that we'd have no clue what they were if we found one lying in the gutter in our own century -"

Jenner was nodding. "Good, good. You're getting it."

"But it's the speed of the thing. Forty years ago, if someone had handed you a computer disk, you'd have been unable to identify it or even suggest what it might be used for. But a thousand years -!"

The car slowed to a creep. They were caught in the eternal bottleneck near JFK Airport. They both sat back and watched the technology roar over their heads in trails of choking hydrocarbons.

"Do you really think technology's going to evolve on an uninterrupted continuum?" Jenner asked, rolling up the windows so they could breathe a little less jet fuel. "It hasn't yet."

"Wars, plagues, religious backlash. Granted. But a thousand years..."

Jenner inched the car forward with the rest of the traffic, then stopped again. "Odds are we'll still be eating our oaten porridge with spoons and defecating into some version of a hole in the ground. Now, if I understand your field correctly, the spoon will probably be mechanized, or perhaps there'll be some way to ingest the oatmeal intravenously -"

"Or just the chemically-integrated nutrients and appropriate amount of fiber -"

"Yummy!" Jenner grimaced. "And your hole in the ground will probably be pneumatically-operated so as to whisk the waste away while you're still in medias res so to speak -"

Rohmer was nodding at her appreciatively now. "Maybe you should take over my job."

Jenner gave her a sidelong look. "Saw it in 2001. Talk about your ancient history..."

Rohmer sighed. She hated the technology part of it. All she wanted was to write good stories about interesting characters. But Maxwell Perkins had died before she was born.